Michael Frayn will talk to John Mullan about Spies, his coming of age story set during the second world war. In a quiet outer suburb of London, schoolboys Stephen and Keith imagine that there are "spies" around every corner, and that the inhabitants of their quiet cul-de-sac are not what they seem. When the two boys begin to spy on Keith's mother, convinced that she is a German agent, they discover that she does have secrets to conceal, although not the ones they suspect. The story is framed by the narrative of the elderly Stephen, recollecting the wartime summer when everything changed for him.